15 March, 2011, 12:08:36 PM

Hi, I have a Sony E353 walkman mp3 player (also plays ogg, aac, flac, etc) anyway, I was thinking of converting my library to AAC 156kbps VBR but I was wondering if that or LAME q3 would drain the battery more, at identical bitrates, let's say 128 CBR for both AAC and LAME Mp3 (I'm using version 3.98.4) which would be a bigger drain on the battery?

Why are you bumping this thread almost a month later after no activity? The OP was asking if anyone here had a very specific Sony player and if owners of that player had conducted any battery drain tests of their own. The quickest solution for the OP would be to just make a series of playlists themselves (one for each respective format), sync them to the player, and spend a weekend draining the battery to see which one would push the player the longest amount of time. Your almost one month reply is actually less helpful to the OP as what saratoga stated. Granted, their reply may have been a little short and lacking explanation but it was an actual reply to the dated topic at hand.

Don't know about the Sony walkman, but on a Nokia N79, testing the CPU usage I got this (most to least CPU usage):OGG Vorbis>>>>>AAC>>MP3>FLAC

So OGG used the most CPU by a significant margin, while the other 3 were more close. AAC still appeared noticeably higher than MP3, while MP3 and FLAC were very close, the latter being just slightly more efficient. But this was just a quick test, I might do something more thorough at some point. I used variable bitrate for all of them. (around 150-200kbps for the lossy codecs, IIRC)

Hi, I have a Sony E353 walkman mp3 player (also plays ogg, aac, flac, etc) anyway, I was thinking of converting my library to AAC 156kbps VBR but I was wondering if that or LAME q3 would drain the battery more, at identical bitrates, let's say 128 CBR for both AAC and LAME Mp3 (I'm using version 3.98.4) which would be a bigger drain on the battery?

The odds that anyone here has done a battery runtime test on some obscure player between two very specific configurations are really, really slim. I'd do a quick google search, and if nothing comes up, test it yourself.

It seems to just depend on how efficient the particular decoding software used on a particular player functions. I don't think that tests done on one hardware and software combination (like the aforementioned Nokia test) will be the result for other players. Or that small differences in CPU load will even make a significant impact on battery life.

There's no database I know of, where you can see how particular formats on particular players perform. No companies have done tests like this on their players. So, the only way to get that information would be to hope someone with your same player has done the tests (and hope their claimed results are accurate), or to do the tests yourself.

I'm skeptical that which format your music is in has any impact on battery life beyond a few percentage points. All my computer experience tells me otherwise. The best way to get battery life is to buy hardware that's rated for longer battery life in the first place. It's a spec that I think people ignore way too much. Like all the laptops I see that only last for 90 minutes. Might as well have bought a desktop...

Don't know about the Sony walkman, but on a Nokia N79, testing the CPU usage I got this (most to least CPU usage):OGG Vorbis>>>>>AAC>>MP3>FLAC

I later did a more thorough test. If there's an MP3 advantage compared to AAC it's actually minimal and/or the CPU usage for those might not be reported accurately if they use a dedicated/native decoder.

Testing the battery life itself is something I'm not planning to do for now. I once let some tracks play through my headphones overnight (about 10 hours, in offline mode) and the battery indicator didn't even lose a bar (out of 7). So it would take several days to drain the battery and I'm not sure I could reliably measure the differences.

There's no database I know of, where you can see how particular formats on particular players perform. No companies have done tests like this on their players. So, the only way to get that information would be to hope someone with your same player has done the tests (and hope their claimed results are accurate), or to do the tests yourself.

I think the only thing like that is the rockbox wiki, but of course thats only tests people have done on Rockbox supported players, and certainly only for a subset of codecs that people cared enough to test battery life for.

I'm skeptical that which format your music is in has any impact on battery life beyond a few percentage points. All my computer experience tells me otherwise.

Computers operate quite differently then small ARM systems, where power consumption can increase many times between idle and load. For ARM9 based systems, battery life can vary by 200-300% between different flac decoders. The difference is probably smaller on higher end processors though, since the idle power becomes much more significant as systems become more complex (as in PCs).